Wether this topic was meant with compassion or just pee take, I can still use the platform it gives.
We look at Leigh, their ex-Wire sweep-up, and how well they are doing, and how much posters are comparing Lammy’s team to Powell’s Wire.
On the face of it put that way, it’s a really damming comparison.
However, there is one key fact that is not considered. It is that Lammy’s team was mostly put together before last season, in the championship. They were but in name a SL fully professional team, and added too at various times.
Where Powell was stripping the team at the same period and mostly only put the team together 6 months ago.
Perhaps we were given a false dawn with the great start, be it few teams had put in the pre-season effort as we had. Our wins coming on the back of a fit large pack, carrying and papering over the dysfunctional outside backs, that were soon to be highlighting when the forwards flounder and other teams grew into the season.
Could it be that Powell needs that extra season to completely cleanse and rebuild the team? Yes we could say that this 2023 team is ‘his team’, when asked the question, he paused, then probably naively said “yes”….
Perhaps he should have said that ‘it is a 3 year building process’ and perhaps that should have been forced upon us from KF in 2022 to take the heat off any false dawns and tits up, allowing Powell the time to get the team he wants it to be.
To anybody looking at it preseason and now after the flip since the winning ‘8’, it’s quite obviously not the team he wants. We couldn’t get the outside backs he wanted. Perhaps the whirlwind start even took Powell by surprise and his longer term objective.
I’d say that initially, our board may have been on that 3 season goal to win a GF.
If an 2024 first GF win was offered to us before the end of March 2023, we’d have taken it!….
(Except me of course)
